The filters were introduced by internet service providers
following measures championed by Prime Minister David Cameron
last year to stop children accessing online pornography.

As many opponents of the move warned, a vast number of
completely innocuous websites have been caught in the same net.
The percentage of sites hosting legal pornographic material
online is thought to be close to 4 percent.

According to ORG, a Porsche broker, a political blogger and a mum
hoping to read an article about post pregnancy care are among
those that have been affected by internet filters, complaining
they found a lack of information about how to get sites
unblocked.

The new ORG service, “Blocked”, checked the 100,000 most-visited
websites and found 19 percent had been blocked by the largest
ISPs (BT, Virgin, Sky and TalkTalk) and various mobile networks.

ISPs have played down the level of censorship, claiming the data
collected is only representative of the most rigorous filter
settings. They claimed they would act on complaints from
customers, however.

“BT is committed to working with all stakeholders to minimize
instances of over-blocking,” a spokesperson for British Telecom
told RT. “All our categorization is done by our third party
specialist supplier.”

“Sites that are believed to be incorrectly blocked by BT
Parental Controls can be reported by email. We will then
investigate them with our supplier.”

A spokesperson for TalkTalk told The Independent newspaper:
“We will only filter out blogs and social networking sites
when a customer has actively logged into their online account
area and chosen to enable filters for this specific type of
content.”

RT asked the Department for Culture Media and Sport how the
government plan to address overzealous ISP filters that create
barriers to legitimate health and educational searches.

“Following a request from Government, the UK Council for
Child Internet Safety has set up a new working group involving
charities and industry to look at the effectiveness of family
friendly filters – in particular to check that they are not
inadvertently filtering out content providing advice to young
people in areas such as sex education,” a department
spokesperson told RT.

An Ofcom spokesman also told RT: “We are due to report in the
next couple of weeks on a government-initiated inquiry into the
level of take up and implementation of internet filtering by the
big four ISPs.”